CAT 5 tonight (Bakersfield woes)

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Casimir
Posts: 26
Joined: Sat May 19, 2018 9:14 pm
Location: KOLV

CAT 5 tonight (Bakersfield woes)

Post by Casimir »

A big thanks to the controller tonight - I passed my CAT 5, but sure didn't feel like I had until she confirmed it.

I was pretty confident all the way up to cruise alt; contacted Santa Barbara Approach for flight following and got all set. I'd missed (not sure how, actually) that I would have to contact LA Center and Bakersfield Approach during the flight following, and had to request the frequencies to be repeated. When I finally got to Bakersfield, I was instructed to land on runway 30L - I landed smoothly and exited the runway to the left. I was asked if I wanted to head to West parking, and decided that would be fine as, according to the airport diagram, there were no parking facilities on the East side. Given instructions to continue down Golf, turn on Delta, cross both runways and then turn on Alpha to parking, sounded fine. However, my FSX KBFL layout is apparently much different than the actual airport diagram:

Image

So, I got kinda... lost. There were no taxi signs on that weird squiggle of taxiway on the East side, and I meandered around for a bit trying to find out where I was - I've never flown into Bakersfield before in the sim, so I didn't expect the difference in layout at all. I ended up at the taxi-way on the north end of runway 30L, and confirmed I could cross. I finally got on Alpha and continued to parking and finished. Apologies if my radio requests to cross the runways were troublesome - I'd taken so long to find what I thought was taxiway D that I felt it prudent to request permission to cross them again.

Lesson learned - despite passing, I nonetheless need more detailed preparation, and should probably check the departure and destination airports in the sim before I fly just to make sure.
Cessna N5351E (A2A C172 / REP XPlane 11 C172)
Piper N5351A (Carenado Seneca V)
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